26 inches tall and seven pounds?! That certainly will be a big one, lots of room for awesome detail! Have a good build! Crimson Dynamo and the MODOK build are really cool builds a great way to have this compo kick off! Posting updates on my Zombie Spider Man Mech later today on MOC showcase!

Well, this is getting depressing. After excitedly assembling my minifig, and cobbling together a cockpit (still not quite worked out all the connections on that) I started work on the rest of the mech and am forced to come to the conclusion that unless I start from scratch, discarding all the work I've done already and drastically scaling down my plans (and lowering expectations accordingly) there is no WAY I have enough of the right pieces to build this thing.

Sigh. I love the contests around here, because I love seeing what everybody comes up with, but usually when I try to come up with an entry, I'm faced with the fact that I just don't have the massive LEGO collection necessary to compete. Here's hoping we have another of those competitions where everybody is using the same set of parts at some point, so that (assuming it's a set I have or can easily get) I can feel like my success or failure lies wholly with my creativity, without consideration of how massive my LEGO budget is.

No matter what size collection you have you'll find that you'll rebuild a contest entry in parts or entirely quite often. However a great place to increase your collection size is on free "yard sale" sites. I picked up a massize blue bin for about $90 CAD and I'm estimating the retail value upwards of about $3000. (Still washing and sorting it. :/ )

Yeah Ed, I hear you, as of now my Spider Man Zombie mech is just a tad over three feet tall... I have a small element collection but the real problem is, how to reign this thing in to under two and a half... pics on my showcase. Yikes! You know what though... just build it anyway... it's easier to resize once you have the elements in the general location they belong.

Thanks, Ultron. I look forward to seeing your mech when it's finished. By the looks of things mine is going to be one of the smaller designs..seeing that it's only about 11 inches high. My detail work is subtle and tends to be overlooked by most. Regardless, I feel that it is one of my better mech builds. Again, glad you liked it!

It'd be cool to see a wide assortment of machines made for this contest. It doesn't have to be the biggest, meanest, baddest to appear on the battlefield. If you've got the bricks, just piece something together and enter it.

No one should be intimidated by the size or bulk of the technological terrors that're promised to come. Sure, size is impressive, but it's not the only thing that counts. In the animal world, nature's the greatest optimizer, and the most successful predators, the cold-blooded (and warm-blooded) killers, aren't the largest beasts. The biggest animals on land and sea are the usually the gentle plant eaters, right?

Say what you will, I doubt anybody will be able to convince me that it wouldn't be a LOT easier to knock up something good, be it big OR small, with a larger selection of pieces to draw from.

Even with a small mech, trying to build one that fits with a specific character's theme can require quite a huge selection to draw from in order to get all the specialized pieces you need AND in the right colors. I certainly couldn't build jackal76's mech in ANY color scheme, not having all those pieces in ANY color. I'd wager that having all those pieces, and in that specific color, represents either a LARGE pool that he's drawing from, or else a special order of parts made just for this contest.

I could build A mech from the pieces I have quite easily. Building one that looks like it belongs to a specific hero or villain (and one that I can knock up a reasonable minifig for) is the challenge, and one that is invariably made far easier by a larger collection.

I'm sorry if I sound like I'm complaining about the contest. I'm not, really. I think it is an awesome contest, and am eagerly awaiting seeing everybody's entries. I may even manage to knock something up myself. I'm really just lamenting the fact that I don't feel it is likely that I'll be able to field an entry I'll be happy with.

In general I DO feel like those with a bigger collection have an advantage in these contests, but that's kind of unavoidable unless you specify the same selection of parts to begin with, and I wouldn't want that to be the norm, as the "sky's the limit" format just makes for much more amazing results.